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Dessert

Preserves, Jellies, Etc

This recipe explains how to preserve fruit with sugar, water, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserves, Jellies, Etc

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve sugar in water in a preserving kettle.

  2. Add egg white and beat well.

  3. Heat mixture, stirring with a wooden spoon until it begins to swell and boil.

  4. Add a little cold water and let it boil again.

  5. Remove scum and repeat until syrup is clear and pours like oil from the spoon.

Cook the fruit

  1. For each pound of fruit, use ¾ pound of sugar.

  2. Boil fruit in a porcelain‑lined or granite‑ware dish.

  3. To make dry preserves, drain fruit from syrup and dry in a moderate oven, turning every 6‑8 hours and sifting powdered sugar over them each time.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled to a syrup, helps set the fruit and preserve it.
Egg white
Binds to impurities as it heats so they rise as scum that can be skimmed off, clarifying the syrup.
Fruit
Provides the flavour and body of the preserve, cooked in the sugar syrup.

The step that matters

Remove scum and repeat until syrup is clear. Skimming the scum that rises as the egg white coagulates clarifies the syrup. Leftover scum makes the preserve cloudy and can spoil its flavour, so the boiling and skimming should be repeated until the syrup runs clear.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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